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What comes to mind when you hear the word "fluorescence"? The first thing you might think of is a highlighter pen. I remember when I was a university student, Professor Tetsuo Nagano, who was a professor at the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo, mentioned in a lecture (the lecture itself was on drug metabolism...) that the green color of Bathclin bath salts comes from a fluorescent dye called fluorescein. Because of things like this, I simply had the impression that fluorescence equals bright, sparkling colors.

In that sense, although I would go on to study fluorescence in graduate school, I might not have properly understood it until midway through my undergraduate years. For example, if you dissolve fluorescent dye powder in water and just leave it in the dark, you cannot observe bright fluorescence (I didn't properly understand this either). Fluorescence is only emitted when a fluorescent dye is irradiated with light of a wavelength that it absorbs. I think the way a shirt glows bluish-white when exposed to a blacklight at an amusement park or aquarium attraction is fluorescence. Currently, our group is developing fluorescent dyes (called fluorescent probes) that have the function of changing from "off" to "on" by capturing specific biomolecules. Twenty years ago, the mainstream approach was gritty trial and error—making something and then evaluating it—but today, sophisticated design of fluorescent probes has become possible, allowing for the logical development of various probes.

In life science research, the situation where fluorescence is currently most valued is "fluorescence imaging." Fluorescence imaging is a technique for observing biological phenomena occurring within living cells in real time by, for example, introducing a fluorescent probe into a living cell and observing it with a fluorescence microscope. With such technology, it has become possible to observe conditions not only inside cells but also within the organs of animals. The importance of fluorescence imaging, which enables such in vivo observations, can be seen from the fact that Nobel Prizes in Chemistry were awarded in 2008 for the "discovery and application of green fluorescent protein (GFP)," in 2014 for the "development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy," and in 2023 for the "discovery and synthesis of quantum dots." In research for developing new fluorescent probes, the thrill and true pleasure of research lie in being able to see previously unseen, unknown biological phenomena with your own eyes.